eradas, estque_
_Captivus Superis gratus, ut ante fuit.'_

'The captive king the evil cures in Spain:
Dear, as before, he doth to God remain.'

"So it seemeth his medicinal quality is affixed not {149} to his
prosperity, but person; so that during his durance, he was fully free
to exercise the same."[23]

Cavendish, relating what took place on Cardinal Wolsey's embassy to Francis
I., in 1527, has the following passage:--

"And at his [the king's] coming in to the bishop's palace [at Amiens],
where he intended to dine with my Lord Cardinal, there sat within a
cloister about two hundred persons diseased with the king's evil, upon
their knees. And the king, or ever he went to dinner, provised every of
them with rubbing them and blessing them with his bare hands, being
bareheaded all the while; after whom followed his almoner distributing
of money unto the persons diseased. And that done, he said certain
prayers over them, and then washed his hands, and so came up into his
chamber to dinner, where as my lord dined with him."[24]

Laurentius, cited by Fuller in the page already given, was, it seems,
physician in ordinary to King Henry IV. of France. In a treatise entitled
_De Mirabili Strumarum Curatione_, he stated that the kings of England
never cured the evil. "To cry quits with him," Dr. W. Tucker, chaplain to
Queen Elizabeth, in his _Charismate_, denied that the kings of France ever
originally cured the evil

"but _per aliquam propaginem_, 'by a sprig of right,' derived from the
primitive power of our English kings, under whose jurisdiction most of
the French provinces were once subjected."[25]

Louis XVI., immediately after his coronation at Rheims, in 1775, went to
the Abbey of St. Remi to pay his devotions, and to touch for the evil. The
ceremony took place in the Abbey Park, and is thus described in a paper
entitled _Coronation of the Kings of France prior to the Revolution_, by
Charles White, Esq.:--

"Two thousand four hundred individuals suffering under this affliction,
having been assembled in rows in the park, his majesty, attended by the
household physicians, approached the first on the right. The
physician-in-chief then placed his hand upon the patient's head, whilst
a captain of the guards held the hands of the latter joined before his
bosom. The king, with his head uncovered, then touched the patie